Help with mouth clicks

[santacore]

Does anyone have advice on cleaning up mouth clicks in Pro Tools? I will be working on a commecial where the voice-over has lot's of clicks. I hoping to not have to draw out each one but I'm guessing that is my only solution. I believe the chief engineer said he has the Waves restoration bundle but commented that it doesn't work for mouth noise. I've never used it so I thought I'd ask the slutz what they think is best. Any help is appreciated.

[largeunit]

Draw 'em by hand!

[AlexLakis]

X-Click might work, never tried it on voice, tho. You might try some EQ to soften it up a little, but chances are your best bet is just to break out the pencil tool.

[JGP]

I use 3 methods to declick voices in PT:
1) If I don't care about timing I zoom in, select the click trying for zero crossings and delete in shuffle mode.
2) If timing is critical, I'll zoom in to the click so it's about 1/4 of the screen, select a waveform just before it watching for symmetry and zero crossings and hit Command d
to duplicate it over the click (so it of course has to be long enough to cover the click),
hopefully "mating" with the next wave form. crossfades if necessary.
3) select the click with bumpers at zero crossings. opt shift 3 (writes new little file)
draw out with pencil. doing the copy give a sure fire way back forever and keeps my backup software from re backing up the whole file.

[Jack Ruston]

Its a real pain that...

It's fine to edit an ad. I once did an audio book. There were clicks. In every other sentance.

Sometimes the clicks are in the tail of the word and you cant get them out.

The only real way around it is to mic at a greater distance and dont use a really toppy mic.

[dbbubba]

Man I REALLY feel for you!

In another life I worked at a studio for eight years that did nothing but radio/TV v.o. work.
Our typical rig was U87, John Hardy mic pre, 1176 into either a WaveFrame 1000 or DAT. We'd EQ on mix out a little bit.
We had five rooms cranking out spots five days a week on identical rigs and there was no way to even consider cutting out mouth noise (well, at least we never did it!)
We DID routinely take breaths down by about 10 db. with the WaveFrames.

We were fortunate because the clients (big ad agencies) only hired the very best talent.
They just sounded good from take number one!

Seriously, after cutting together THOUSANDS of spots, I don't recall mouth noise and clicks being a problem... EVER?

I'd suggest this:
Use a good condenser mic w/o much EQ (maybe a bit of 5K on mix)
Don't have the talent work the mic too close.
Good talent knows how to work a mic.

I used to HATE clients who brought in cheap talent!
It'd take hours to record what a real talent cold do in thirty minutes!
"Take number NINETY NINE"
Not only do non pro voice talent folks take forever, they are a bitch to edit because they can't keep a constant voice for a long time.
It's hard to match takes up to previous stuff.

Have fun!

Are you sure that you are not worrying about noises because you might COULD cut them out? Mouth noises and clicks were just never an issue for literally THOUSANDS of spots. These were spots that you heard daily and were used coast to coast for MAJOR companies.

Move that talent back off the mic.
Don't EQ too much (don't try to make it sound like "radio" with EQ)
Don't worry about compression TOO much because radio and TV processing and transmitter chains squash the dog piss out of EVERYTHING anyways!

Screw it! Just run that sucker as it is!

Danny Brown

[Legacy]

Hi Santacore,

Find someone with Algorythmix reNOVAtor or Cedar Retouch. Most likely (not having heard the noise...) either one will kill the mouth noises with great success. I have often removed noises like this with reNOVAtor. They are the only solution I know of that reliably works. I second that the Waves NR will not remove them or will have too much sonic compromise by the time it starts to remove them.

If you're on either coast or have the time to FedEx I can refer you to folks who have them. PM me.

Best,
Silas

[Ruairi]

Hi Santacore,

are you on a HD rig, if so Sonic Nonoise is the answer, it is unbelievabe at removing all kins of clicks, ticks and thumps. I just finished mixing a female vocalists new age record the other day. The tracks were recorded impecably but the singer has the craziest mouth clicks in random places, probably 200 per song. I spent several days zapping them with nonoise to please the borderline obsessive client and the good news is that she wants to mix 3 more albums with me

You can often find nonoise licences for sale on ebay for about half price, one of the best plugs I ever bought,

cheers,
Ruairi

[cdog]

Using Logic, I highlight the clicks and insert silence.

[Geert van den Berg]

I draw them out by hand.